[![](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/27Apr2025.jpg?w=840&ssl=1)](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/) # Today's links [The enshittification of tech jobs](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others): Our last line of defense has fallen.[Hey look at this](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#linkdump): Delights to delectate.[Object permanence](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#retro): 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024[Upcoming appearances](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#upcoming): Where to find me.[Recent appearances](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#recent): Where I've been.[Latest books](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#latest): You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.[Upcoming books](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#upcoming-books): Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.[Colophon](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#bragsheet): All the rest. ![An altered version of J.C. Leyendecker's Labor Day 1946 cover illustration for Hearst's 'American Weekly' magazine. The original features a muscular worker in dungarees sitting atop a banner-draped globe, holding a sledgehammer. In this version, his head has been replaced with a faceless hacker-in-a-hoodie, and his sledgehammer has been filled with Matrix code-waterfall characters. Leyendecker's signature has been replaced with an IWW graphic depicting workers with upraised fists all joining together to form a gigantic fist.](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/digital-labor.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) # The enshittification of tech jobs ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others)) Tech workers are a weird choice for "princes of labor," but for decades they've enjoyed unparalleled labor power, expressed in high wages, lavish stock grants, and whimsical campuses with free laundry and dry-cleaning, gourmet cafeterias, and kombucha on tap: All of this, despite the fact that tech union density is so low it can barely be charted. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. When you're getting five new recruiter emails every day, you don't need a shop steward to tell your boss to go fuck themselves at the morning scrum. You can do it yourself, secure in the knowledge that there's a company across the road who'll give you a better job by lunchtime. Tech bosses sucked up to their workers because tech workers are *insanely* productive. Even with sky-high salaries, every hour a tech worker puts in on the job translates into massive profits. Which created a conundrum for tech bosses: if tech workers produce incalculable value for the company every time they touch their keyboards, and if there aren't enough tech workers to go around, how do you get whichever tech workers you can hire to put in as many hours as possible? The answer is a tactic that Fobazi Ettarh called "vocational awe": "Vocational awe" describes the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done. Ettarh uses the term to describe the pathology of librarians, teachers, nurses and other underpaid, easily exploited workers in "caring professions." Tech workers are weird candidates for vocational awe, given how well-paid they are, but never let it be said that tech bosses don't know how to innovate – they successfully transposed an exploitation tactic from the most precarious professionals to the *least* precarious. As farcical as all the engineer-pampering tech bosses got up to for the first couple decades of this century was, it certainly paid off. Tech workers stayed at the office for every hour that god sent, skipping their parents' funerals and their kids' graduations to ship on time. Snark all you like about empty platitudes like "organize the world's information and make it useful" or "bring the world closer together," but you can't argue with results: workers who could – and did – bargain for *anything* from their bosses…*except* a 40-hour work-week. But for tech bosses, this vocational awe wheeze had a fatal flaw: if you convince your workforce that they are monk-warriors engaged in the holy labor of bringing forth a new, better technological age, they aren't going to be very happy when you order them to enshittify the products they ruined their lives to ship. "I fight for the user" has been lurking in the hindbrains of so many tech workers since the *Tron* years, somehow nestling comfortably alongside of the idea that "I don't need a union, I'm a temporarily embarrassed founder." Tech bosses don't actually *like* workers. You can tell by the way they treat the workers they don't fear. Sure, Tim Cook's engineers get beer-fattened, chestnut finished and massaged like Kobe cows, but Cook's *factory* workers in China are so maltreated that Foxconn (the cutout Apple uses to run "iPhone City" where Apple's products are made) had to install suicide nets to reduce the amount of spatter from workers who would rather die than put in another hour at Tim Apple's funtime distraction rectangle factory: Jeff Bezos's engineers get soft-play areas, one imported Australian barista for each mini-kitchen, and the kind of Japanese toilet that doesn't just wash you after but also offers you a trim and dye-job, but Amazon delivery drivers are monitored by AIs that narc them out for driving with their mouths open (singing is prohibited in Uncle Jeff's delivery pods!) and have to piss in bottles; meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers are injured at *three times* the rate of other warehouse workers. This is how tech bosses would treat tech workers…if they could. And now? They can. Writing for the *Wall Street Journal*, Katherine Bindley describes the new labor dynamics at Big Tech: It starts with Meta, who just announced a 5% across-the-board layoff – on the same day that it *doubled* executive bonuses. But it's not just the workers who get shown the door who suffer in this new tech reality – the workers on the job are having to do two or three jobs, for worse pay, and without all those lovely perks. Take Google, where founder Sergey Brin just told his workers that they should be aiming for a "sweet spot" of 60 hours/week. Brin returned to Google to oversee its sweaty and desperate "pivot to AI," and like so many tech execs, he's been trumpeting the increased productivity that chatbots will deliver for coders. But a coder who picks up their fired colleagues' work load by pulling 60-hour work-weeks isn't "more productive," they're more *exploited*. Amazon is another firm whose top exec, Andy Jassy, has boasted about the productivity gains of AI, but an Amazon Web Services manager who spoke to Bindley says that he's lost so many coders that he's now writing code for the first time in a decade. Then there's a Meta recruiter who got fired and then immediately re-hired, but as a "short term employee" with no merit pay, stock grants, or promotions. She has to continuously reapply for her job, and has picked up the workload of several fired colleagues who weren't re-hired. Meta managers (the ones whose bonuses were just doubled) call this initiative "agility." Amazon is famous for spying on its warehouse workers and drivers – and now its tech staff report getting popups warning them that their keystrokes are being monitored and analyzed, and their screens are being recorded. Bindley spoke to David Markley, an Amazon veteran turned executive coach, who attributed the worsening conditions (for example, managers being given 30 direct reports) to the "narrative" of AI. Not, you'll note, the *actual reality* of AI, but rather, the *story* that AI lets you "collapse the organization," slash headcount and salaries, and pauperize the (former) princes of labor. The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses. Another of Bindley's sources went through *eight rounds* of interviews with a company, received an offer, countered with a request for 12% more than the offer, and had the job withdrawn, because "the company didn’t want to move ahead anymore based on the way the compensation conversation had gone." For decades, tech workers were able to flatter themselves that they were peers with their bosses – that "temporarily embarrassed founder" syndrome again. The Google founders and Zuck held regular "town hall" meetings where the rank-and-file engineers could ask impertinent questions. At Google, these have been replaced with "tightly scripted events." Zuckerberg has discontinued his participation in company-wide Q&As, because they are "no longer a good use of his time." Companies are scaling back perks in both meaningful ways (Netflix hacking away at parental leave), and petty ones (Netflix and Google cutting back on free branded swag for workers). Google's hacked back its "fun budget" for offsite team-building activities and replacement laptops for workers needing faster machines (so much for prioritizing "increasing worker productivity"). Trump's new gangster capitalism pits immiserated blue collar workers against the "professional and managerial class," attacking universities and other institutions that promised social mobility to the children of working families. Trump had a point when he lionized factory work as a source of excellent wages and benefits for working people without degrees, but he conspicuously fails to mention that factory work was deadly, low-waged and miserable – until factory workers formed *unions*: Re-shoring industrial jobs to the USA is a perfectly reasonable goal. Between uncertain geopolitics, climate chaos, monopolization and the lurking spectre of the next pandemic, we should assume that supply-chains will be repeatedly and cataclysmicly shocked over the next century or more. And yes, re-shoring product *could* provide good jobs to working people – but only if they're unionized. But Trump has gutted the National Labor Relations Board and stacked his administration with bloodsucking scabs like Elon Musk. Trump doesn't want to bring good jobs back to America – he wants to bring *bad* jobs back to America. He wants to reshore manufacturing jobs from territories with terrible wages, deadly labor conditions, and no environment controls by taking away Americans' wages, labor rights and environmental protections. He doesn't just want to bring home iPhone production, he wants to import the suicide nets of iPhone City, too. Tech workers *are* workers, and they once held the line against enshittification, refusing to break the things they'd built for their bosses in meaningless all-nighters motivated by vocational awe. Long after tech bosses were able to buy all their competitors, capture their regulators, and expand IP law to neutralize the threat of innovative, interoperable products like alternative app stores, ad-blockers and jailbreaking kits, tech workers held the line. There've been half a million US tech layoff since 2023. Tech workers' scarcity-derived power has been vaporized. Tech workers *can* avoid the fate of the factory, warehouse and delivery workers their bosses literally work to death – but only by unionizing. In other words, the workers in re-shored factories and tech workers need the same thing. They are class allies – and tech bosses are their class enemies. This is class war. # Hey look at this ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#linkdump)) ![](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/heylookatthis2.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads (h/t Slashdot) Runaway Tren How Monopolies Could Exploit the Tariff Shock ![A Wayback Machine banner.](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/wayback-machine-hed-796x416.png?resize=796%2C416&ssl=1) # Object permanence ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#retro)) #20yrsago Architectures of Control: DRM in hardware #20yrsago Insect photos in naturalistic #20yrsago BBC: DRM makes music customers mad #20yrsago Guckert was at the White House even when there were no press briefings #20yrsago FBI warnings ruin CD art & art is the reason for buying CDs #20yrsago US govt admits RFID passports are danger to Americans #15yrsago Considering cities as “dense meshes of active, communicating public objects” #15yrsago Peter Watts won’t go to jail #15yrsago Canada’s Heritage Minister ready to bring back DMCA-style copyright, throwing out results of copyright consultation #15yrsago In praise of SFWA’s Grievance Committee #15yrsago UK’s super-rich get even richer #15yrsago Protect your copyrights, boycott DRM-locked platforms #15yrsago Why I won’t buy an iPad, the podcast edition #15yrsago On Peter Watts’s sentencing hearing #15yrsago The “fair use economy” is enormous, growing, and endangered by the relatively tiny entertainment industry #15yrsago UK election: ask your candidates if they’ll repeal the Digital Economy Act #10yrsago Town will cut off power to families of kids who commit vandalism #10yrsago Portraits of e-waste pickers in Ghana #10yrsago In the 21st century, only corporations get to own property and we’re their tenants #10yrsago Obituary for an amazing history teacher #10yrsago What the UK Greens actually believe about copyright #10yrsago School bus driver bans little girl from reading #10yrsago Variations on the Trolley Problem #10yrsago Senators announce “Aaron Swartz Should Have Faced More Jail Time” bill #10yrsago Kansas kid corrects anti-drug teacher, cops raid his house #5yrsago Makers in a time of pandemic #5yrsago A deflationary pandemic #5yrsago The vernacular signage of the pandemic #5yrsago California Adventure, Minecraft edition #5yrsago Security expert conned out of $10,000 #5yrsago Facebook let advertisers target "pseudoscience" and "conspiracy" #5yrsago Amazon uses its sellers' data to figure out which products to clone #5yrsago US telcoms sector isn't doing better than Europe's #5yrsago Masks work #5yrsago US healthcare fails insured people too #5yrsago "Inject disinfectant" vs both sides-ism #5yrsago A labradoodle breeder is in charge of America's vaccines #5yrsago Which guillotine is right for you #5yrsago Hospital cuts healthcare workers' pay, pays six-figure exec bonuses #5yrsago Pandemic proves ISP data-caps were always a pretense #5yrsago Billionaires thriving on our pandemic losses #5yrsago Podcasting Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town #5yrsago Indie booksellers during the pandemic #1yrago The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home #1yrago The specific process by which Google enshittified its search #1yrago Antitrust is a labor issue # Upcoming appearances ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#upcoming)) ![A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/appearances2.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) Auckland: Unity Books, May 2, 6PM Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15 Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16 Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley): PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22 PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20 London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1 Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2 Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3 New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025 ![A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/recentappearances2.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) # Recent appearances ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#recent)) Move Fast and Break Kings Beyond the Web (Ostrom Workshop) Can we use the Internet for Democracy? ![A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/recent.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) # Latest books ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#latest)) Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 ().The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 ([the-bezzle.org](http://the-bezzle.org/)). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (). "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies () "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (). Signed copies at Book Soup (). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books . Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): [and Forbidden Planet (UK): .](https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2873/Wed%2C_Apr_26th_6pm%3A_Red_Team_Blues%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/) "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. ) (signed copies: ) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: ; personalized/signed copies here: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: . Get a personalized, signed copy here: . ![A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/upcoming-books.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) # Upcoming books ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#upcoming-books)) Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026 Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026 The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026 ![](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/colophon2.jpg?w=840&ssl=1) # Colophon ([permalink](https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#bragsheet)) Today's top sources: Slashdot (). **Currently writing:** Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud) A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025 **Latest podcast:** Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION ![](https://i0.wp.com/craphound.com/images/by.svg.png?w=840&ssl=1) This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. 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Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow